


Come clean

by zdorik_sandorik



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alcoholism, Canon typical mentions of abuse, F/M, Incest, Jealousy, Mentions of rape attempts by close family members, Multi, Southern Gothic, murderous incestuous twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:54:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24020170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zdorik_sandorik/pseuds/zdorik_sandorik
Summary: The tips of their shoes touch, hers perfectly clean, his muddy, although they both were running wild in the woods.-	It’s as if the dirt wouldn’t stick to you two, - the boy says. – You Macaulay twins, always clean and dressed in white.
Relationships: Camilla Macaulay/Charles Macaulay, Camilla Macaulay/Charles Macaulay/ OC
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	Come clean

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily inspired by Stoker (2013), Sharp Objects (2018). My apologies to the fine people of Beaufort, South Carolina for using their town for this, but it was the first one Google suggested.  
> This is not beta-read, so apologies for any mistakes you may find.

**Beaufort, South Carolina**

In small towns like Beaufort you don’t need to know for certain, that someone talks about you – everybody there talks about everybody. So ‘those Macaulay twins’ are really no exception.

The two picturesque young twins who were moved to live with their grandma to the Great old House by the woods, after their mommy and daddy were killed in a horrible car accident, poor dears, were quite the talk of the town. At church people talked about them for weeks, such excitement only natural in a small town like this.

\- Those poor kids, bless their souls. Well now they’re in good hands, I’ll tell you that, living with their nanna is the best thing that could’ve happened to those kids, and all their aunts and uncles will be so close to them. The twins will get used to it just fine.

‘The twins’ is how they end up being addressed throughout their lives. Always the two, never perceived as separate persons.

Charles and Camilla Macaulay came from money, old money, older than most parts of this country. Old money might not account to as much as Wall Street sharks or oil executives get nowadays, but there is something, anyone will tell you, you could never mistake about old money. Whether it’s the bearing, the upbringing or simply the odd way they stick out against the rest, they’re the class of their own.

The big old house in Beaufort, South Carolina, stood like a crowning jewel of this town. Built by first settlers of this town some 200 years ago, it stood tall and proud, with its back to the thick woods, filled with streams and ponds where every child went to play, without a fear of anything ever happening to them. The Great old house stood there, generations before you were born, and it will stand there long after you’ll be gone. The family who owned it, Macaulays, always lived in this house, their ancestors lived there before them, and there was not ever a thought in anyone’s mind about selling this house or moving away from it. It was not the way things were done.

The house indeed was a thing of beauty. Tall, white, it stood there for two centuries, and yet, despite the distinct style of architecture, it looked so well kept, it was almost like it came from a painting - white, tall, with porches and stained glass, with luscious rose-garden aunt Cora Macaulay tends to in the mornings. This house was loved, taken care of, lived in. There Charles and Camilla, newly orphaned, moved when at the age of nine.

-

While they were getting used to the new house, nobody questioned why kids would sleep in the same bed, since they were quite old for that now.

Ms Heathcott, the housekeeper, who worked for this family since she was a small girl – not a lot of other work you could do in a town like this - watched them cuddle together for a nap during hot days, and didn’t say a thing to their grandmother. Those poor kids were grieving the loss their parents, after all, better let them be.

As they get used to their new house, Charles started playing the big grand piano that nobody touched since 1950s, and every soul in the house was overjoyed. Camilla sat with him on a wide stool, that fit both of them easily, and swung her little white-socked legs in rhythm to a lively tune.

Ms Heathcott watched them grow and warmed up to them, she found out early how charming can the twins be, when both of them give you their undivided attention and adoration. Dressed in their prim white clothes, that they never managed to get dirty, no matter how wildly they played in those woods, the twins were a picture of angelic children one only sees in art. She would watch them play and would leave extra treats for them, she couldn’t help herself – anyone who saw the twins wanted to spoil them. Anything they asked for – she would get them, never considering saying no to their (quite modest) whims.

-

Two months after their move grandmother says it’s time for the twins to sleep in different rooms. They say nothing, only nod grimly.

The next day, Charles falls from a tree in the backyard, and breaks his arm. They rush him to the hospital, Camilla sobbing by his side and clutching her own little arm, as if she was hurt there too. He gets a cast but has to spend a night in the hospital and they take Camilla away, through much protestation from both of them. At night, the house is woken up by her piercing scream. They find her on the floor of her room, clutching a visibly deformed arm, mirror of the one Charles broke. How she managed to break it – they never find out. Doctor says it couldn’t simply be that she fell from the bed, the arm must have been hit deliberately.

They both end up in casts for two months and nobody questions it when, on the first night back, Charles takes his pillow and goes to sleep in Camilla’s room.

In the morning they sit at the grand piano, and play a tine, each with their good hand, even though Camilla never learned to, only watched Charles do it.

-

When twins are thirteen their uncle, who moved to live at the house after his wife left him and he hit the bottle harder than usual, uncharacteristically starts to show interest in them. Everyone is surprised to see him at breakfast, that he usually sleeps off after a nightly row, and even more so at dinner – for he is almost always out of the house for a drink. He sits at porch and watches twins chase each other, listens to Charles playing piano, asks Camilla what she’s reading so enthusiastically, one day he even asks Charles if he wants to play catch outside – something that puzzles Charles, although he agrees and goes with him.

Nanna thinks it’s a good for him, maybe Charleston (ironically their uncle’s name), will be able to go back to his former self, in time, instead of all this boozing and trouble he always gets himself into, embarrassing the family before the whole town.

Camilla sits on a porch, late on a hot July evening, with a cool glass of lemonade, water droplets dripping down on the skin of her bare knees. It’s peaceful and quiet, breeze cooling her pleasantly, if not fully sufficiently, and in the distance she could hear Charles playing piano for Nanna.

She follows the familiar tune in her head, having heard Charles play it many times, when loud screech of the door interrupts it and her uncle, visibly drunk, comes outside and sits down near her.

He stinks of cheap scotch and cigarettes, and Camilla tries to get up, but he holds her down with a firm grip.

\- Now not so fast honey, why don’t you sit with your uncle for a minute.

His hands slide up her white linen skirt and his face moves to her neck.

She throws her glass to the floor with force, loud crack of ice startling her uncle, and at the exact same moment housekeeper storms in. She takes one good look at his hands under her skirt and then at her.

‘Why, miss Camilla, you gave me a scare,’ she gasps and shakes her head. Camilla springs to her feet and steps on broken glass, her white socks becoming crimson with blood.

‘I’m sorry Ms Heathcott, I was clumsy,’ she says as if the pain doesn’t bother her at all.

‘Come now, child, your feet are hurt, let’s get you cleaned up.’

That night Camilla sneaks into Charles’ bed and tangles her bandaged feet between with his.

Ms Heathcott now watches sharply whenever Charleston is around twins, and if she sees Camilla alone with him – makes sure she’s near and able to intervene anytime.

In a year, he is dying of acute liver failure in a paid comfortable room at the local hospital. Grandmother takes twins to see him and to say their goodbyes, because everybody knows, he’ll be gone soon, and that is what you do.

‘It’s family,’ she says.

He looks thin and dry, sleeping when they come, because he stayed up all night (doctors says it’s what happens when the liver starts to fail), much like he did at the worst of his drinking. His skin is a lemony sort of yellow, as are his eyes. He no longer smells of scotch, instead, as you come closer, he smells like baked apples, ripe almost at the point where they’re about to go bad. Years later, it will be the smell Camilla will associate with South.

-

Camilla is fourteen when boys start to happen in her life. One boy, specifically, from Kansas City, so out of place here in small Beaufort, and so proud of it, that it’s almost laughable. He comes over to Charles and Camilla when they’re sitting under a tall oak tree outside school, she’s reading, and he lies with his head on her lap, napping.

The boy comes up and asks in that terribly unceremonious manner someone from the city might have.

\- Hey, Macaulay, wanna go out with me?

Camilla stares at him and doesn’t say a word. Charles doesn’t make a move to get up from her lap, but opens his eyes.

\- And you are?

\- Dick Rooney, moved here from Kansas City, we have chemistry together, - he says and laughs at his own joke.

Charles gets up from the grass and dusts his perfectly white pants.

\- Let’s go, Millie, we’ll be late for lunch.

Kansas City watches them go with undignified look.

She would think that that would be all there is to be about that, but later that week he corners her on her way out of class, all big smiles and curly hair.

\- So whaddaya say, Macaulay, wanna get some fries with me after the game?

\- And here I thought you were asking my brother out, not me, - she smiles and walks past him, but he keeps up with long stride.

\- Nah, don’t get me wrong, you both look like two peas in a pod, but your brother is not exactly my type.

She laughs. The boy wears leather jacket even though it’s scorching hot and humid, mid-May, and ventilators don’t do much to help. He smiles at her too, all teeth and charm and deep blue eyes, and she thinks it might not be such a bad idea after all.

\- Yet you say we’re two peas in a pod, - she says and lets him open the door for her.

She goes out with him that Friday and he kisses her, all rush and enthusiasm, but it’s sweet and she enjoys it. Three weeks later he moves back to Kansas City. Charles is sulky the whole time they go out together, and only brightens up a bit once the boy is gone. When she asks how did he manage to scrape his knuckles bloody, he just sulks.

-

In a town like Beaufort you learn how to hide liquor pretty early on. No one asks if there is something special in peach ice tea, served at a church function, because they know there is. No one thinks to ask to drink from your water bottle you have with you because they know it’s likely not water. Uncle Charleston might be dead, but no one questions why the bar supplies gradually empty at almost the same pace. After all, there are bridge games, there are aunts whose cocktail hours start at one past noon.

Camilla always has been a better drinker than Charles, although no one could say that he didn’t try to outdo her with enthusiasm. They also learned pretty early on, that the real difference between old money and not, in a place like Beaufort, was the kind liquor you could afford. Once you move to cheapest vodka, no matter what big shiny house you drink it at, you’re no better than the poorest bastard in a shed that is falling apart.

Later, it’s what causes her to look twice at the amount of liquor Charles hits in Hampden. Nothing new with bourbon before noon, or indeed a third cocktail before dinner, but it becomes cheap whiskey from a corner shop at breakfast and before she knows it, he starts to smell just like her uncle Charleston did.

_

After Kansas City boy there are other boys and girls who try to come up to one twin and act like other one does not exist. They all don’t last long, discouraged in the end by silent hostility that weighs you down with as much as a pointed stare, carefully chosen words that cut like a blade, or unshakeable feeling that this is not your place, which you can only master when you grow up in a house like theirs.

There was, however, a boy, all big eyes and shabby knees, constantly sunburnt, although he was born and raised in this town, with its scorching heat. He was the only one, who managed to get close, because he never tried to separate the twins, but came for both of them. He came up to them, one day, to ask something so innocent and friendly they both didn’t bat an eyelash. After that, there were walks in the woods, games in a shabby cabin, known to every kid in Beaufort as the place you come to ‘hang out’.

On that long summer there was swimming in a large pond, and contests on who will hold their breath underwater longer. Afterwards they sat on a blanket and drank from the same bottle of grandma’s whiskey, not the expensive stuff, something she won’t feel was missing.

He sat between them, and without so much as glancing at one another, the twins made their move at the same time – Camilla pulled the boy in for a kiss, Charles went for his neck with his lips. They kissed and touched each other like awkward teenagers do, quickly, excited and with anxious sensation it could end any minute now. Afterwards, the three of them lay laughing and playing cards until the sun began to set and they’ve finished their bottle of whiskey.

-

\- Mrs. Macaulay, - chief of police says, tipping his hat at her respectfully. – I hate to bother you at this late hour, but uh…

They eavesdrop from up the stairs and try catch a glimpse of how the policeman looks through the stained glass of the door.

\- I’m afraid we need to talk to the twins, they were the last who saw him.

The boy went missing on that same day, after they’ve headed home from the pond. His mother waited and waited, but when the night set and he was nowhere to be found, she called the police in tears.

He questioned twins, who looked visibly upset and worried. There were search parties, press pieces about the mysterious disappearance, curfew for all the children and vigils at the local church. The boy became the very same missing boy they scare young children with.

Every time someone looked at twins, they thought of that missing boy, and how was it that they were alright, and he’s the one who went missing.

\- Isn’t there something weird about those Macaulay wins, always out on their own. Never playing with other kids, and one time they did, look what happened?

They talked in churches, they talked in school, at social functions, at memorials, everywhere they went. It was to be expected, for a place like this doesn’t get a better topic often.

No kid approached them after that. It was fine for them, they only needed each other, after all.

-

 **Hampden College, Vermont**.

Sometimes, when she lies awake, with Charles’ body wrapped around hers like a cocoon, she thinks about that pale missing boy with shabby knees. In her mind, she comes back to that old shed, a not so secret place dear all the adolescent youths of Beaufort. Everybody knows what happens in that shed, what you go there to do. It’s old wood, plastered all over with lewd pornographic pictures boys that age find hot. She remembers them playing hide and seek, by the river, her hiding in the shed and waiting someone to come get her. It’s the boy who comes, hiding under the desk with her. The tips of their shoes touch, hers perfectly clean, his muddy, although they both were running wild in the woods.

\- It’s as if the dirt wouldn’t stick to you two, - the boy says. – You Macaulay twins, always clean and dressed in white.

She kisses him under that desk and later they come out, when she hears Charles call to them – they won the game.

She thinks about herself, on a different day, looking through the dirty thick glass of the shed window, that has not been clean for decades. The edges of it are broken she can’t see much through all the posters covering it from the inside. Through the muddy glass she sees Charles and the boy, on the floor, rubbing furiously against each other, their cocks in each other’s hands.

-

The first time Charles leaves a mark on her body they’re drunk out of their minds at a party. She lets a random boy kiss her, press her against the wall, sliding his hand up her skirt and to her underwear. Her eyes lock with Charles, who stands across the room and looks at them with a mixture of lust and anger on his face.

Later, at home, she rides him on the floor of the living room, by the not working fireplace. She does so at her own, selfish pace, high on booze and his jealousy, until he flips her and pins her to the ground, pushing into her at almost punishing pace. He holds her down by the wrists and kisses her, hungry, jealous, drunk, biting her lip and grunting low and animalistic when he spills inside her.

She looks at herself in the mirror later – lip bleeding, wrists red – and slides a hand down to touch herself.

Sometimes she wishes they could be happy with someone like they were with that boy. Just the three of them. She could be happy this way. Not dealing with Charles’ mad, drunken jealousy, his desire to mark her, possess her. And her own, quieter, more menacing, jealousy. His rage is gone by the morning, when he sobers up and hates herself for how he made her body look. Hers rage seeps and simmers, over days, over weeks, in everything she does to him. She drives him mad, until he can’t take it anymore and the circle repeats itself.

The first time Charles sleeps with Francis they’re in his country house. She sees them through the crack of the door, tangled together; Charles is even less delicate with him than he is with her.

She leaves the house and walks to the lake, where the boat Henry and Bunny rowed in the morning lays abandoned at the bank. The water, on this cloudy night, looks almost black. She takes off her dress and shoes, and steps into the water, warm, soothing. She imagines that she swims in thick pool of blood, letting it cover her completely, letting it soil her, since nothing else can.

That autumn she cuts her foot in the same lake, the water becoming blood in pure daylight. Charles is so sickened, whether from the sight of blood, or the thought of himself hurting her, when he tries to take the glass out – she doesn’t know.

-

\- I’m sorry, Millie, - Charles hugs her from behind and kisses the terrifying bloody bite mark on her shoulder that he left last night. – I’m really sorry.

The large mirror, that hung in their living room is shattered, the remains of crystal glass that he threw at her, all over the floor.

-

She wishes Francis could be their third, but deep inside she knows, he loves her, but he will only ever want Charles.

-

_They’re in the deep thick woods, and she is a deer. Her antlers are her crown, and she moves through the woods, lead only by a sense, that beside her, around her, in her is Dionysus. She sees the man before he has a chance to see her, and charges forward, impaling him on her mighty antlers. Her crown is now of blood. It looks as black as water of the lake did on a moonless night._

-

Richard, she thinks once, as they ride together on the backseat, although looking nothing like the boy, reminds her of him so much. He naturally fit in and connected with the twins from the beginning. Charles approached him at his own volition, he naturally gravitated towards them in any room. Maybe he could be the one who’ll stay with them.

When he kisses her, she sees why that won’t ever happen. His desire for her is a selfish one, it would never accommodate for both of them. After that it’s almost easy to lose interest in him.

Charles loses Richard more painfully, through betrayal, as he sees it.

-

_She’s perched on a tree near the lake, her legs swinging back and forth in water, completely clean, as if she has not spent hours running barefoot through the woods. Unsullied, she thinks and lifts her hand to ruck the loose strand of hair behind her ear._

_Her hand comes back bloody. Her crown of blood._

-

Henry was never going to be their third. That much was clear to all of them. And yet, Henry saw her, as deep and clear as she saw him. The nonverbal connection between them was of the kind that only Charles could ever understand.

Henry could never be their third, but Henry could very much be what finally separated them.

When they push Bunny off the cliff, it is her and Henry who go down to check if the deed is done. She brushes her hands off on her pants after the climb only for a show – there is no dirt on them.

When Henry shoots himself, she’s close enough to be sprayed with his blood. When the police lead her down, shaken, to the ambulance, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Blood only got to her hair, not her face.

‘The only way to purify blood is through blood,’ she thinks to herself. ‘Now I am clean.’

-

She sits on the porch of her Grand old house, late at night, with tall glass of ice tea. Her grandmother is upstairs, struggling to breathe. Ms Heathcott is with her, putting an oxygen mask on her.

Charles is somewhere far away, finally separated from her for good. She touches her stomach, as if it was the exact place where they were connected, and it hurts.

When they buried Bunny, and Henry was barely able to stand, she saw him smudge the ground on his suit. He caught her eye.

She understood why he did that. He wanted to be clean too.

-

She’s 26 and her grandmother is dead. That aching place, where she imagined her and Charles were connected, the same one where Henry touched her before he died, where the boy kissed her on that humid summer day by the pond, stopped hurting months ago.

She couldn’t feel anything anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> This was not at all the work i imagined myself writing after my first and second read of 'The Secret History'. Somehow i always thought i would write a story about Henry Winter conquering death and going on a murderous spree, helped by Hannibal Lecter. But quarantine happened, and so i read Mayfair Witches, with all its descriptions of Great old First Street house, Sharp Objects happened, with its images of this small deep south (i know it's in Missouri) town where the twins grew up the inspiration struck.  
> This is, in my head, not the end of Camilla's story. I have always been fascinated with her character, so clearly meant to remind us of Medea, and how, in a way, she was the only one who fully understood Henry, while remaining more in touch with our sad world than he ever was.  
> I am a firm believer in Donna Tartt's intent to make all the characters suffer for what they did (and us, with that epilogue), but I do what i want.  
> Come say hi on[ **tumblr** ](https://zdorik-sandorik.tumblr.com/), or in the comments if you love Secret History as much as I do, or deep southern murderous incestuous twins.


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